Don’t Take My Word for It

Recently I stumbled across the following. Take a look and consider its implications not just for your medical treatment, but for all aspects of your life.

One study found that when confronted with a patient with back pain, surgeons prescribed surgery, physical therapists thought that therapy was indicated and yes, acupuncturists were sure needles were the answer. Across the entire universe of patients, the single largest indicator of treatment wasn’t symptoms or patient background, it was the background of the doctor.

In other words, the conditioning of the particular specialist was the single biggest determinant in the solution he or she prescribed.

And what of your conditioning? When you visit your physician for diagnosis and treatment of an ailment, do you take into account her conditioning when she recommends surgery, that maybe her left-brained, science-fixes-all upbringing has something to do with her inclination to submit you to the scalpel? When depression lands you on the couch of a psychiatrist, do you picture the myriad forms of conditioning – some of them perhaps quite unpleasant or downright dysfunctional – that led him to become a psychiatrist in the first place?

Let’s say you have an ailment that forces you to seek help. Were you raised to respect and admire authority, to take the word of a doctor as gospel? Perhaps your mother, conditioned by her authoritarian, physician father, reminded you, again and again, “The doctor knows best,” and you unconsciously follow this thinking even while something inside you whispers, “This is a bad idea.”

Meanwhile your vegan homeopathist neighbor recommends a course or two of osteopathic “realignments” along with some meditation to relieve stress. But your neighbor is also a bit “out there” and you live in an upper-middle-class, conservative Christian neighborhood that doesn’t cotton to talk of chakras and kundalini. So you opt for the surgery.

Let’s take it a bit farther and suggest that the surgery does wonders for you – your problem is solved. Years later your own child faces the same medical predicament. You regale him with the entire story, the wisdom of your mother and the doctors, the lunacy of your neighbor, the joys of post-surgical relief. Your son has the surgery, he is crippled with pain for the remainder of his life. Which of your conditioned paths is to be believed?

So often life boils down to an argument over whose conditioning is “right.” We argue with a mate, a neighbor, a different political party or religious group, a foreign nation, about what we “know” to be true, rarely if ever stopping to ask, “How, exactly, do I know that to be true?” Our hypothetical parent could argue that her experience suggests doctors are right and that surgery works; except that none of it actually panned out for her son. She’s now so thoroughly confused and depressed she seeks out a psychiatrist and here we go again….

Einstein famously noted, “One cannot solve a problem with the same brain that created it.” The answer isn’t to “change the way we think” but to not think at all; to let our thoughts swirl past like flotsam on a river, neither rejecting nor identifying with them, until at last the “still inner voice” can be heard through the conditioned clamor of our supposed being.